From a reader:
Dear Jonah,
I confess to never having watched a complete episode of ST:DS9, but I have
seen every ST:TNG episode multiple times. It is clear to me that the
allegorical baddies representing Jews/Israelis are the Cardassians. Think
about it: they have a strong, aggressive military. In the “Picard gets
tortured” episode, His Baldness laments that the Cardassians once had a
great culture, but they let themselves turn into militaristic brutes. Their
victims, the Bajorans, OTOH, are every campus lefty’s wet-dream of the
Palestinians: oppressed, matriarchal, deeply spiritual, living in camps.
Hold me while I retch.
The Ferengi don’t really cut it as The Eternal Jews. In the first Ferengi
episode, Riker says that they resemble his “Yankee trader” ancestors. Ooh,
there’s that wretching feeling again. BTW, ‘ferengi’ in Arabic means ‘Frank’
or Western European, a term which is clearly distinct from ‘yahud’, the
Arabic word for ‘Jew’.
Overall, the politics of TNG was uniformly of the DeanKos variety. There’s
nary a libertarian to be found in the galaxy. Come to think of it, DeanKos
would make a great name for a villain in the next cinematic installment of
The Franchise. Somehow, I don’t think it will happen.